The Sword.

Lately, my boys have been fascinated by knights and castles and dragons, and I´m thrilled by that. I sometimes feel that it´s a lot harder to connect to my sons than to my daughters, with whom I share many interests.
But this, this knights in shining armour stuff, this is exactly my topic. I love medieval markets, renaissance fairs, I love to dress up, and I love fairy tales. Hey, back then, in my university times, I even took classes about historical learning, nutrition in the middle ages, women in the middle ages, and Mittelhochdeutsch.
So, we can rock this topic :)
We read tons of books about the Middle Ages, and I tried to tell them that the majority of the people back then weren´t knights, but farmers. We talked about the concept of bond slaves, which they think is very fascinating. Lately I get a lot of sentences like..."The only one I can belong to is myself!" and "I want Eva to be my bond slave!" and "But what if I want to be your bond slave?"
Yeah, I´m rambling again, and here I wanted to show you how we whipped up that sword above.
I guess there are many ways making a sword, some more durable, most of them better looking. The advantages of this one are that it´s a) for free and recycled, b)so easy a four year old can make it, or at least help, and c) less dangerous than a wooden one, because you can´t really hurt anybody with it.
So... here we go:

 

Cut a blade from cardboard (in my case, an old amazon box) and attach three toilet paper rolls by cutting slits in them. 

Put crushed paper in each toilet paper roll, and cut two little triangles from your cardboard, to give the thing a little more structure. Attach them with hot glue, and while you´re at it, fix the toilet paper rolls with hot glue, too. 

Wrap fabric around the three ends, to make it look cool. We debated a little whether we should go for "royal blue" or "red as blood" or "dragon green". If you don´t have fabric, take napkins.

Stabilize the whole thing with tape. We just happened to have crepe, but I guess packing tape or whatever would be just as good. Wrap your tape in a way that will secure the loose ends of your fabric, like so: 

And then, you simply cover the blade with aluminium foil - we didn´t even use glue, we simply crushed it around the blade. And then wrapped the handhold with yarn we had from another project. That wrapping was the longest part, and Ronja did most of it. 

And because every knight needs not only a sword, but also a shield, we...

...made one:

Very...um...crispy. 

Matching music (well, sort of...)